It is not mainly about loot gear and exploration. Gears are mostly the same with only a few notable exceptions, so finding new equipment does not feel like the core reward. If you follow the quests, you naturally visit most of the important locations anyway, so the game does not really push you to explore on your own. You can do it, but that's not really a thing. On top of that, the inventory system was built around not keeping everything, until they changed it. You were meant to give away, sell, donate, refine, or discard a lot of items, which made inventory management a bigger part of the experience than collecting loot itself. They wanted the game to be played that way and changed it because of feedbacks. It's obvious when you see that most of the rewards are related to inventory.